In a 2019 survey jointly administered by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University (Tsinghua PBCSF), more than 90% of Chinese public firms report that they closely monitor the stock market for the purposes of learning information to guide real investment decisions and of accessing external financing. These findings provide direct evidence for the wide existence of market feedback via a learning channel and a financing channel, suggesting that the Chinese stock market is not just a side show, but instead, affects the real economy.
Despite private enterprises dominating China’s labor market, college-educated workers are still highly concentrated in the state sector. Using data from the Chinese College Student Survey, we find that 64% of students in the sample expressed a strong preference for state-sector employment.
Financial regulation can have unanticipated consequences in the financial system. The evidence from China’s interbank market shows that banks tend to use newly introduced and lightly regulated financial instruments to get around regulation during their search for funds. Banks facing greater competition or higher liquidity shortages have more incentives to engage in such activities. Such interbank activities are closely associated with banks’ proprietary trading, suggesting the potential risk of financial contagion.
In this paper, we analyze “trusted-assistant loans,” which were loans issued (typically) by Shanxi Banks during the Qing period to finance newly appointed scholar-officials. Even though creditors lacked legal rights and, in fact, lacked every repayment enforcement mechanism advanced by economic contract theory, repayment rates on these loans were relatively high and they constituted a large and profitable portion of many banks’ loan portfolios. This paper develops a theory of “resource-based” debt contract enforcement that rationalizes repayment and tests the hypothesis of this theory using data from scholar-officials’ diaries and nineteenth century Chinese bank records.
The roll-out of the internet in China boosted firms’ exports and overall performance even before the rise of broadband and major e-commerce platforms. This finding is relevant for the many developing countries trying to strike a balance between widening access to basic internet services and deepening it through the creation of broadband networks and connections to major e-commerce platforms.